Pierre Auger Observatory pinpoints source of mysterious highest-energy cosmic rays

摘要

The Pierre Auger Collaboration has discovered that active galactic nuclei are the most likely candidate for the source of the ultra-high-energy (UHE) cosmic rays arriving on Earth. Using the world's largest cosmic-ray observatory, the Pierre Auger Observatory (PAO) in Argentina, the team of 370 scientists from 17 countries has found that the sources of the highest-energy particles are not distributed uniformly across the sky. Instead, the results link the origins of these mysterious particles to the locations of nearby galaxies that have active nuclei at their centres (Pierre Auger Collaboration 2007).